Dirk Pranke wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:54 PM, John Hudson<tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
>>> As to seeing the users do the wrong thing, I also have seen a
>>> tremendous number of people pirate MP3s, but that doesn't mean that
>>> iTunes and Amazon are now doing the wrong thing by selling files in
>>> that format.
>> Fonts are not music.
> The analogy to music was purely intended to illustrate the
> consequences of trusting (or not trusting) your customers. I was not
> attempting to claim that music was analogous to fonts.
I understood that to be your point. My counter point is that the
differences between fonts and music, and the different customer base,
imply different markets, not least in terms of scale. I don't think the
retail MP3 business model has anything to do with 'trusting customers'
per se, and everything to do with an economy of scale in which massive
unlicensed copying and sharing is an acceptable cost of doing business
because the income from the people who pay are similarly massive. This
is because, as a consumer product, the overall demand for music files
includes a very large number of people who will pay. The overall demand
for fonts includes a relatively small number of people who will pay, and
a majority of other people who either refuse to pay or who simply don't
realise that they are supposed to pay.
Further, the vast majority of computer users are exposed to fonts as
things that 'come with their computer', either bundled with the OS or
with other software. They are not customers of the font vendors in any
direct sense, so it is not a question of whether we trust our customers
or not. Our actual customers tend to understand our position because we
have relationships with them -- at least, we tend to if we're small
independent font foundries in which the font vendor is also the type
designer --, and they understand the value of what we're licensing to
them. And, once again, the people who are concerned about protecting
fonts against casual misuse are in some cases the customer and the web
author.
For the most part, we trust our customers just fine. It's everyone else
we worry about. :)
JH